epub.js is abandoned - can we align on a replacement?

[jordanmichaelrushing]

I wanted to fix an issue with the ebook reader skipping the last page of a chapter on my Android. The issues seems to stem from a bug in the epubjs package, but the npm package Jellyfin-Web uses seems to have been abandoned. Based upon the quick chat on Matrix it seems this hasn't been discussed, so I'd like to start that here as I'd like to fix the issue at hand for myself and a wider audience.

It looks like there are a lot of forks, basically all abandoned as well.

• The one fork that has the most stars and has activity even from today is https://github.com/intity/epub-js/ that one is almost a drop-in replacement, but would have a little bit of work to get it up to date. I believe it has also already fixed my issue. I worry about the longevity of this project though

• https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate-js this is not a drop-in, it's rewrite on their end, but someone who was previously working on the original futurepress version and the Engine behind Foliate, the GNOME ebook reader. Its rendering runs in a WebKitGTK webview, and the JS inside that webview is foliate-js. Foliate 1.x/2.x looks like it used epub.js, he hit its limits, wrote foliate-js from scratch, and Foliate 3.0 (2023) switched over to this. I think this is the best long term strat,

• readium/ts-toolkit : TypeScript, backed by the Readium Foundation (the EPUB-standards org). Heaviest option but institutional maintenance, and it covers ebooks + audiobooks + comics . Though their audiobooks are... niche and wouldn't work for Jellyfin. One engine could theorectically back Jellyfin's book and comics players instead of two ad-hoc ones. Feels a bit too heavy.

tldr: intity/epub-js for a simple as "drop-in", probably intermediate solution. foliate-js for a better longer term solution imho but more upfront re-work. ts-toolkit I think would be too heavy for Jellyfin.

[thornbill]

@dkanada has been doing a lot of work on books lately. Perhaps they have some thoughts.

[dkanada]

Foliate: It doesn't look like foliate-js is much more active than epub-js so we might run into the same issue at some point. It does include MOBI / KF8 support which is nice. If it has everything we need for EPUB I'd support this as a replacement, on the condition that typings are created.

Readium: Doesn't seem like a good choice because they expect everything to come with a "Readium Web Publication Manifest" and assume that will get generated on the backend.

I don't support using a random fork of epub-js even if it is currently active.